Blythe
Masters, CEO of Digital Asset Holdings, thinks US regulators
could lag behind other countries facilitating blockchain
implementation into the financial services
sector.
YouTube/ColumbiaBusiness
Blockchain is technology that underpins bitcoin, and it could
have a huge impact on how Wall Street will operate in coming
years.
Lately, industry cheerleaders have pointed
to businesses including loan syndication, land titles
and property records, and clearing trades as potential uses
of the technology.
"The upside is enormous,” Nasdaq’s Peterson
told event attendees during the discussion.
Even this early into blockchain’s introduction
to Wall Street, budding industry experts are bullish on the
technology’s potential.
Exchanges are interested
too.
At the Coindesk consensus
conference September 10 in New York, Nasdaq chief information
officer Brad Peterson told attendees he expects the exchange to
start implementing technology to clear trades, among other
functions.
Venture capital executives and bankers said
they believe a big influx of capital is coming for blockchain,
which has the potential to disrupt various elements of finance
and transaction execution.
Bitcoin has gone from a hacker plaything to a mainstream
financial instrument accepted in coffee shops.
Blockchain is a distributed ledger through
which each transaction is tracked and recorded, eliminating
ambiguity on pricing and ownership.
But Wall Street doesn't care about the cryptocurrency. It is the
technology behind it - the so-called blockchain - which gets
finance executives really excited.
“None of our products are dependent on bitcoin
as a cryptocurrency,” Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset
Holdings, told Business Insider.
“We
build solutions on top of any distributed ledger whether it's the
Bitcoin blockchain or a private network."
"Regulators don't know how to deal with it,"
said Erik Gordon, clinical assistant professor at the
University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. "We've got to
get regulatory consistency to get into the mainstream."
Big banks are looking to
link to blockchain, and it would have major ramifications on Wall
Street.
REUTERS/Jim
Young
Attendee lists at recent industry events serve
as a testament to how seriously big banks take the technology.
Executives from Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America,
Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Fidelity have been
present.
Masters previously spent decades at JPMorgan,
and her new company is one of several that is seeking to use
blockchain technology to help build secure settlement systems for
assets.
Speakers at the event September 10, including
Masters, said they believed blockchain technology might catch on
faster in other countries where regulators are quicker to adapt
to new technologies.
Bitcoin is a digital currency, the value of which fluctuates
wildly. It has caught the eye of regulators, with New York
Department of Financial Services publishing this summer
publishing a framework
for regulating digital currency firms.
The company's looking to make use of blockchain technology
extends from small, startups such to big banks: Masters' former
employer JPMorgan for example is working internally to
develop blockchain technology, according to a person familiar
with the matter.